Cerebras Systems

Cerebras $CBRS filed their preliminary S1 with an odd cadre of investment banks - Citi, Barclays, UBS, Wells Fargo, and a bunch of little guys. The absence of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan speaks volumes.

[There is no IPO deck or valuation numbers, but the full Cerebras AI day is linked below. Once they amend the filing and start marketing, we'll be back with a more extended analysis.]

The core feature of the Cerebras approach is to build chips the size of full silicon wafers. By making them so large, they can have more memory and more processing on a single chip, thus "minimizing the time-consuming and power-hungry movement of data."

So far, Cerebras chips' actual performance has been comparable to Nvidia's in terms of both cost and performance. The current AI spending tide is strong enough to lift all boats. Revenues have grown rapidly in the past two years—from ~$25M in 2022 to ~$80M in 2023 and to $136M for the first half of 2024.

Cerebras's net losses are still high ($67M so far in 2024), but they are declining.

Cerebras Positioning & Competition

The company will tout the advantages of their single wafer solution over existing (read Nvidia) approaches. The core arguments are: